All You Need To Know About The Software Development Lifecycle

If you run a small company and you’re forever hunting for the latest piece of software to help your business run more efficiently, support with payroll or allow the effective integration of your calendars across numerous platforms, you may wonder how software packages see the light of day with so much competition from rival software companies. The software development lifecycle can be summed up in five easy steps and is not as complex as it may appear.

1. Identify The Issue To Fix

Like all companies, the developers that create the latest software undertake a great deal of market research to inform them of the problems that are the greatest bugbears for businesses. If they can be the go to company to fix the issue, they know that they have a money-making product on their hands. Software companies will ask business leaders, app developers and coding experts across a range of industries to tell them how their working lives could become more efficient and streamlined. It is then the software developing companies job to release software that can achieve this aim.

2. The Design Specification

Software developers will beaver away, attempting to brainstorm a range of solutions to their stakeholders problem. The technical wizards will then turn what is required from the software into a design specification which sets out a plan of how the developers will build this new piece of software. The end users of this software can then offer up their feedback on the plan which the developers can then act upon to ensure the most appropriate product will be brought to market.

3. The Build

The developers can then carry out their favorite part of the software development lifecycle and get coding. They utilize all their programming skills to build as bug-free a software program as possible.

4. Quality Control

To make sure that the coding is sound and glitch free, the software then enters the testing process. Developers can now utilize date and time shift testing to put the software through its paces at any point in the future in real time. This technological time travel allows developers to see potential future problems and iron them out before they have a chance to occur, a sort of software Minority Report.

Beta testing also occurs where people run the software live and see if there are any issues with its application. Any problems and the developers can revise the code ready for launch.

6. Deployment And Maintenance

When ready, the software package is then released to the market. This is the point where you can finally get your hands on it and utilize it for your company. Developers will then ask for feedback from business leaders like you to enable them to tweak aspects of the design such as usability, menu screens, and aesthetics. As business needs become more complex, developers need to release updates and upgrades to ensure their software doesn’t become obsolete.